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Virtual geotagging

With the growth of services related to geotagging, what about “virtual geotagging”? Roughly, this would include adding location data to tweets / blog posts / photos related to virtual worlds. So then you could find screen shots related to a given region or star system in EVE Online (“astrotagging”?) or tweets about some particular battlefield or raid in World of Warcraft.

At first, the metadata might be fairly imprecise by its nature. Flickr photos could be tagged with the appropriate name, and later uses of the data would do their best to guess the actual location, but typos and misspellings could cause hangups. In the cases of the two virtual worlds I just mentioned, developers could use in-game browser hooks or UI mods might be able to extract location or other circumstances and apply it as metadata to whatever the player wants to share.

Users could later visualize aggregates of this data with the Google or Yahoo Maps APIs or something similar. A variation on this for World of Warcraft already exists to map current game data. It doesn’t have the ability to map user-generated content, though it clearly could anticipate this sort of virtual geotagging.